I am the Saviour

We are walking and I can feel their footsteps behind me but they are together and I am alone.

The railway tracks are covered with overgrown grass and haphazardly thrown around rubbish and old blood.

The Old Ones used the trains to take the werewolves to the camps. The grey prisons made of chains and death. The camps where my parents died.

We are crammed onto the train and no one can move and it is impossible to see or hear because the only thing in my ears is the voices screaming and they are screaming DIE DIE YOU ARE GOING TO DIE THERE IS NO HOPE THEY'LL KILL YOU WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LIVE FOR and everything they say is true everything they say is true THERE IS NO HOPE.

I walk onwards, every step one closer to what I was born for. Behind me Annie and Mitchell are hand in hand, following me because there is no one and nowhere else. In the air between me and them I can feel the tangible pressure of a quarter of a century's misery and fear and life pressing on me. Do they feel it too?

I will not deny that I am lucky, one of the luckiest. I am a werewolf and I am alive. None of the others are alive; the camps killed them all in the end. If there are any left then they are living like I have lived, hidden in secret, with no rights and no hope, constantly sacrificing the safety of others to continue to live what only the kindest soul could call a life. We are the luckiest only because the others died in living Hell. I will not live like this anymore. It is time for me to do what no one but me can do, what I have been living for all this time.

We arrived in the camp and they branded us all with a symbol because we are not human and we will never be human because we are monsters. We are spattered with the blood of our brothers, the other werewolves who tried to resist by spitting their blood at our vampire guards. WEREWOLF SCUM HOW DARE YOU NO NO DON'T KILL HIM NEED TO TEACH YOU SOME MANNERS WE DO NO PLEASE NOT MY LEO SHUT UP YOU STUPID BITCH. They were killed. We watched with a feeling of hopelessness that is incomparable to anything I have faced in the years that have passed since I was Bitten. I can barely remember the feeling of humanity.

I have no memory of my parents. The Old Ones found them as they fled the country with me in their arms. A werewolf couple to add to their sick collection of monsters so much less monstrous than themselves. We are poisoned with a sickness that is dormant almost all the time. We are lost to ourselves just one night of every month. Vampires kill needlessly and constantly, in full knowledge of their actions. How can they lock us up when we have done nothing? What can they expect us to do?

Mitchell would hate these thoughts. He would tell me how little control vampires can have, how impossible it is for them not to succumb to the bloodlust. He believes that he has a monster inside him too, a warped, controlling, bloodthirsty version of himself who has no morals and no conscience.

It terrifies me to think of that creature living in the heart of my oldest carer, companion, and friend, John Mitchell.

I think it terrifies him even more.

We have been in this cell for weeks there is not enough food there is not enough air there is not enough life. All I can smell is sweat and blood and death. Every day they throw more of our kind into this cell and every day there is less reason to keep living. Tonight it will be the full moon and they will not take us out of this prison. I look around me and wonder which of us will see the next dawn.

We are walking past an old billboard that is crumbling with age, the massive poster pinned to it peeling and wearing away. I hope that the face on the poster will crumble and peel and wear away from life. Hal Yorke has been a valuable tool in the conquest of the vampires. He has pioneered their regimes, stood as their leader, and made speeches about the rise of the vampires.

He is violent.

He is sadistic.

He is, quite literally, their poster boy.

SHOW NO MERCY screams the poster. Even now the ink-bled letters shout the message Hal will leave as his final legacy. I can hear his voice yelling itself almost hoarse at the rallies, his power and passion conveyed in every gesture. A distant memory slips through the web of broken thoughts in my mind, and I remember a moment from the past. It was more than fifteen years ago, but I can feel it as though it was no more than a breath ago.

I am ten years old and I am walking down a busy city street, Mitchell pulling me gently by the hand. Ahead of us the square is emptying, as the people who turned up to listen to Hal Yorke's maddened speech leave the frenzied world of the rallies behind them. Mitchell speeds up, trying to seem casual, but I can feel the fear on the cold skin of his hand as it clutches mine anxiously. As we walk level with the platform, I see Yorke surveying the scene through empty, grey eyes that lost all emotion a hundred lifetimes ago. Behind his back, he is twirling a domino through his fingers.

They took my Nina. They made us transform in this cage all together and most of them died and Nina died but not me WHY NOT ME WHY AM I ALIVE IN THIS FUCKING HELL ON EARTH WHY WHY please let me die.

I want to stop walking but if I stop walking then the death will not stop so I am walking and nothing anyone can say will stop me. Mitchell tried, of course. But Mitchell has always tried to dismiss the legends of my destiny, because he has cared for me for the longest time. When they took my parents away, Annie went with them to try and help a cause that had crashed and burned the second it was thought of. But she had to go, because she owed my parents that. So she went, and Mitchell escaped with me to a safe house where an old friend lived. After a month, Annie came back to us. It was not a safe house for much longer, and we fled, leaving behind us another dead soul to whom I owe a thousand debts that I have no hope of paying. After that, Mitchell and Annie raised me together. We lived in the outskirts of the cities, scrounging and living off whatever we could. To the casual observer, we were just like the other people who lived on the streets, dust blown under the carpet and lost. Although Mitchell had lost what Annie always said were once excellent pleasantries and social skills, we managed to fit in well enough in that community. When there is no other home for you to flee to, you have no choice to make. You live where you can, and so we did for nearly twenty-five years. It was a difficult life. But we were lucky to have something we could call a life.

I am completely lost now and I have nothing to think of because there is nothing and Annie is here but I cannot hear her words because I need Nina and she is gone and she is never coming back. I hear a voice close to me. 'Hey.' My voice is hoarse as I reply. 'Who are you?' 'I'm Tom.' He talks fast and in a rush like he doesn't have enough time for all of his words and they don't fit in his mouth. 'I been a werewolf all me life, I had no chance of getting outta this mess. I hate the vampires though. They killed me dad. And now they'll kill me.' 'They killed my Nina.' 'I know, mate. I'm sorry.' They are putting us in the cage tonight. We will not fight. Then they will kill us both. We welcome death.

The memories of the years are stretching painfully between us now and it is a physical ache to think of what I owe these two people. They found us, eventually, living in our enclave of the lost in the outskirts of the city. It took them nearly twenty-five years, but they found us. They recognised Mitchell, and then there was nothing for us, and we fled again. But I knew that this constant running was useless now. We thought we were running away when really all along we were walking straight into the arms of an inevitably painful truth. Only when they found us again and we fled did I see it, but now I know: I am the Saviour. The destiny that Mitchell denied and Annie hid from for so long is true. I will end the rule of vampires and deliver the human race to a new age.

They put us in the fighting cage and we didn't fight and then they killed us because we were stronger than their rules. They think they've beaten me, but I have what I want now. I can see my body, bloody and broken, on the ground a few metres from me. Everything is calm now, and so, so quiet. I can see a door, the door that has finally come for me, after all these months of suffering. The door is from my childhood home, a comfort I knew before I was Bitten. Now I can return to that comfort. Now I am going home. I can see Annie and she is crying but she knows. She understands. I look at her and I say, 'I have to be with my Nina.' She nods and smiles through her tears. 'Look after our Eve for us, Annie.' She nods again and says, 'I promise.' And then I feel something on my face which I have not felt for a long time. It is a smile. I turn and open the door, and the light takes me away from the Hell until I know it no more.

My mother, Nina Pickering, died in the camp when they made the werewolves transform all together in the cage, brutally ripping each other apart. My father, George Sands, was killed by vampires for not cooperating with the dog fights. Annie was with them as they died.

I will not let their deaths be for nothing. I know now what I was born for. I know what I have to do. I will rip away the curses that have plagued too many of us for too long. I will let all of us be human, in a world where the evil that has crept into our hearts cannot exist. The werewolves eternally suffer for just one night's evil out of every month. Vampires are given an uncontrollable blood lust and cannot even look at someone without imagining their teeth ripping into their neck and tearing out their veins and drinking, drinking, drinking. And ghosts have to serve an eternity of wandering this broken planet, watching everything they loved die and everything change, while they are forced to be the same forever.

I will end these curses.

I will force the Devil to renounce his power using the Trinity.

Mitchell is the vampire.

Annie is the ghost.

I am the werewolf.

And I am the Saviour.